simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors — I felt a kindness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. I have never made an acquaintance since that lasted, or a friendship that answered, with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety which a palpable hallucination warrants, the security which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath points of much worse matter in his composition. It is observed that "the foolisher the fowl, or fish, woodcocks, dotterels, cods'head, etc. the finer the flesh thereof;" and what are commonly the world's received fools but such whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys? Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. - MUSIC Elia: All Fools' Day. WHEN my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey some five-and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings, or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) — a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid his soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive -impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly," - still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German Ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end; - clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me the genius of his religion hath me in her toils a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuoushe is Pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too-tri-coroneted like himself! I am converted, and yet a Protestant; at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: - I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus - Gog and Magog - what not? till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lu theran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. Elia: A Chapter on Ears. LORD C. THEN as to sentiment. . . . This kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot; or sent off in waterplates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot or nook where a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream was it? or a rock? no matter but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey 't is likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's hot restless life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an act; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his Lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendant, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon? Ibid., Distant Correspondents. TITIAN'S ARIADNE PRECIPITOUS, with his reeling satyr rout about him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan.... With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant - her soul undistracted from Theseus Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. Elia: On the Production of Modern Art. THE BODLEIAN ANTIQUITY! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing, art everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! What were thy dark ages? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why is it we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping? Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. Elia: Oxford in the Vacation. AMICUS REDIVIVUS AND doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus. A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts poet or historian of Grecian or of Roman lore to crown with unfading chaplets the halffinished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected him Tyrwhitt hoped to |